Evidence for the Late Arrival of Hot Jupiters in Systems with High Host-star Obliquities

TL;DR

This study investigates the relationship between stellar obliquity, age, and convective envelope mass in hot Jupiter systems, providing evidence that misaligned hot Jupiters tend to be older and arrive late, with tidal interactions influencing alignment.

Contribution

It offers a homogeneous analysis of stellar parameters and demonstrates that stellar mass, not convective envelope mass, best predicts obliquity, supporting late migration theories.

Findings

Older hot Jupiter host stars tend to have higher obliquities.

Stellar mass is the strongest predictor of obliquity among studied parameters.

Tidal realignment likely affects the population of aligned hot Jupiters.

Abstract

It has been shown that hot Jupiters systems with massive, hot stellar primaries exhibit a wide range of stellar obliquities. On the other hand, hot Jupiter systems with low-mass, cool primaries often have stellar obliquities close to zero. Efficient tidal interactions between hot Jupiters and the convective envelopes present in lower-mass main sequence stars have been a popular explanation for these observations. If this explanation is accurate, then aligned systems should be older than misaligned systems. Likewise, the convective envelope mass of a hot Jupiter's host star should be an effective predictor of its obliquity. We derive homogeneous stellar parameters -- including convective envelope masses -- for hot Jupiter host stars with high-quality sky-projected obliquity inferences. Using a thin disk stellar population's Galactic velocity dispersion as a relative age proxy, we find that hot Jupiter host stars with larger-than-median obliquities are older than hot Jupiter host stars with smaller-than-median obliquities. The relative age difference between the two populations is larger for hot Jupiter host stars with smaller-than-median fractional convective envelope masses and is significant at the 3.6-$\sigma$ level. We identify stellar mass, not convective envelope mass, as the best predictor of stellar obliquity in hot Jupiter systems. The best explanation for these observations is that many hot Jupiters in misaligned systems arrived in the close proximity of their host stars long after their parent protoplanetary disks dissipated. The dependence of observed age offset on convective envelope mass suggests that tidal realignment contributes to the population of aligned hot Jupiters orbiting stars with convective envelopes.